Slashdot Mirror
How Not to Build a Cellphone
Jamie found an NYT story about a new t-mobile Shadow phone which starts off by talking about how Apple is changing the phone game by wrestling power from the carriers, and then discussing what could be a reasonable piece of hardware. And then how it is wrecked by software. The phone has wait screens, a task manager, odd error messages etc. Makes for an amusing read.
Everything you need to know starts in paragraph eighteen:
And, this isn't even Microsoft's fault! It's T-Mobile's CEO who had the hubris to think he could design this thing just like Jobs. Not.
I think the article actually goes a little easy on the critique of the hardware. I doesn't break any ground. It has too many or too few buttons. The middle ground they took with the Blackberry licensed keyboard was just plain wrong. This phone is just a mess. Apple kinda pulled this feat off, designing a do-everything phone (I kinda disagree, btw), and now everybody else thinks they can do it too. They even think it's the right thing to do (it's not).
But, what were they thinking going with MS Mobile? Wth? Sheeesh... it even comes with a Task Monitor? Yeah, I'm gonna help my Dad with his new phone... "Bring up the Task Monitor... now click on the Processes tab. Now click on the CPU column twice. What's eating up the most CPU? ... That's the central processing unit....
ummm... Okay, now highlight the one eating up all the CPU and click the "End
Process" button.... " Not.
Another place the article "gets it wrong" trying to be kind in his critique:
Wrong! That's not an advantage, that's insane. At least, I can't remember the last time I was looking at my cellphone thinking, "Damn, I wish right now I could open up a Word document!", not even if one was attached to an e-mail.
I'm still waiting for the phone that sounds and works like a phone.
Bit of trivia, speaking of phones... Know what the little graphic on the Sprint logo stands for? Didn't think so. It represents a stop-motion pin dropping. Remember when Sprint's commercials were about phone call sound quality and how it was so good you could hear a pin drop? Didn't think so. Please, oh, please, let me hear the pin drop again!
"A locking feature, which prevents the buttons from being pushed accidentally in a purse or pocket, is nice. But it should be optional. And one button press should suffice to unlock it; two in sequence is just annoying."
I was actually taking this article to heart until I read this paragraph, then I realised the author has probably never had any real mobile OS design experience. There are a lot of things wrong with WM6, but I'd like to see an article written by someone with a little more consideration for mobile design necessities.
...talking about how Apple is changing the phone game by wrestling power from the carriers... Right. Apple has certainly wrestled control away from the carriers. Now, instead of just paying the carrier blood money and selling our soul for two years, we get to pay both Apple AND the carrier... and still sell our soul away for two years. Maybe Nokia can compete with Apple by coming out with a phone where I need to sign a 5 year soul sucking deal with the hell (like AT&T, but more pleasant), have the phone chomp on my balls while it is in my pocket, eat my first born child, and get a direct hookup to my bank account from where it funnels money into everyone's pocket but my own.Come on Google, buy the damn spectrum, open it up, and lets say fuck you to the ass pounding consumers are getting in the US cellular market.
In all fairness, his comments assume that all Windows Mobile 6 editions are created equally which isn't the case. On this phone, we're looking at Windows Mobile Classic, which is a phone only implementation (without touch screen/stylus interface). While I for one don't have the patience (and nor does the author of the article) to click through menu after menu on a cell phone, I have moved to an interface that I find pleasing to use -- Windows Mobile 6 Professional. Being able to directly interact with the screen on the phone is the same as adding a mouse to your desktop PC. Imagine if the author was given a copy of Windows XP and only a keyboard to navigate... can you imagine the complaints? So as sexy as he perceives the hardware to be, clearly it needs additional functionality to be the powerhouse that he's looking for.
Looking forward to him eating his words when he reviews the HP iPaq 910 with Windows Mobile 6 Professional.
I've never found one that's well-designed. They may exist, but I've never had or seen one.
What I want:
1) The ability to turn the volume up or down in a wider scale than they give us. If I can't hear someone with the volume at max (usually when they're on a landline), the scale needs to go higher. My phone goes up to five; it should go up to eleven. It's a device whose principal function is the capture and transmission of sound, yet it has ONE thing you can control about the sound: inbound sound volume, in a limited range. This is ridiculous. This is stuff that could be included essentially for free, since it's all software that doesn't take much processing power. For instance, it'd be nice to have some sort of intelligent parametric EQ. Sometimes you get someone on the other end with a sucky headset and it'd be nice to be able to fix it yourself or have the phone do it for you.
2) The phone to tell me what the hell it's doing signal-wise. I've been standing on top of a mountain and looking over a canyon at a cell tower (~2 miles distant) and have no signal. Sometimes calls get dropped even though I have four "bars" of signal. Is it a SNR problem? The phone trying to do a tower swap and failing? Who the fuck knows? Give me frickin' iwconfig, please. It's like the Windows boot sequence. Either it works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, who knows what went wrong. But Windows at least has Safe Mode...
3) A phone that doesn't fucking break. My old phone had a keypad that kept going bad. My new phone now thinks that there's a headset plugged into it when there's not. Sometimes it thinks I don't have a SIM card in it.
4) I hesitate to suggest this since they seem incapable of getting even simple things right, but replace SIM cards with SD cards (they're effectively a commodity now, $20 for 2GB). Poof, instant long-play pocket audio recorder!
Because they want a good quality camera, phone, PDA, laptop, etc. not a all-in-one gadget with a mediocre everything?
Because they want a good quality camera, phone, PDA, laptop, etc. not a all-in-one gadget with a mediocre everything?
Precisely. My phone is my link to the outside world (calls, text and tethering via bluetooth) but I take my pictures with my camera, keep track of appointments and contacts with my PDA (along with using it for GPS) and surf the web etc etc etc with my Thinkpad. My laptop can and will always provide a better internet experience than a device with a weaker processor, less storage space and a ~3" screen. Simple physics inhibit a great-quality set of optics in a reasonably sized phone, and stupid carrier lock-downs prevent most phones from really doing anything that useful. I also have a watch with a built in compass (helps when using my PDA to navigate around cities on foot).Frankly, Windows Mobile 6 is a mess. Common features require an infinitude of taps and clicks, and the ones you need most are buried in menus. Apparently the Windows Mobile 6 team learned absolutely nothing from Windows Mobile 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
I wholeheartedly agree: I received a low-end HP PDA years ago for Christmas. Windows Mobile worked so poorly that I didn't even bother to get the thing replaced on warranty when it broke within two months (battery couldn't hold a charge to save its life).
I already miss the 'antiquated' Palm OS that ran on my Treo. The article was nice enough to bring up a couple of my favorite reasons as to why...
First of all, a cellphone should not display a "wait" cursor. Ever. And definitely not almost every time you change screens, as on the Shadow.
One of my favorites: I run a nearly stock version of WM6 on my HTC Mogul phone, with the only additions being the free version of Epocrates and an SPB Diary application. My phone has a more-than-adequate CPU, yet still lags while switching screens.
Do I need to "wipe and load" my phone to make it run faster? Sheesh.
A cellphone should not have a Task Manager. You should never have to worry about quitting programs because you've used up too much memory.
Amen! I also love how the phone has a knack for running out of memory right when an important call comes in. There's nothing more frustrating than a ringing phone that won't show me the phone screen and where the buttons suddenly don't work.
So what? Quality is actually not all that important to the vast majority of the population as you make it out to be. The optics used in cell phone cameras are certainly a lot better then disposable cameras cheap plastic optics yet those cameras were extremely popular before, cameras on cell phones and the price of digital cameras bottomed out. They certainly aren't "professional" quality but very few cameras are.
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
because he doesn't care enough to make the effort.
A blog about stuff.
Ya but for every one of you, there are ten non-technical people for whom the phone/pda/camera/laptop/mp3 player/blender/sink is good enough. For some people the utility of having a swiss-army-phone outweighs that of having a specialized device because they don't care about quality, just something that gets the job done.
Because the vast majority of the time, in the best case, you end up with a device which is a mediocre camera, a mediocre phone, a mediocre PDA, and a mediocre laptop.
In fact, most of the time you get a really expensive device with a crappy camera which takes poor quality pictures and you have to select through several menus, so it takes longer to take a picture than even my crappy kodak C300 I got for christmas, which takes several seconds to start up from off to on. You get a crappy phone which works, but ends up being suboptimal for a phone. You get a crappy PDA, which is not only locked down so you can't run your own programs, but ends up being suboptimal for a PDA, especially if it only has a numberpad for input. Inputing alphabetic chars into the numberpad works, but you have to admit it is a pain in the ass. You get a "laptop", but again, your choice of software is locked down, and are you really going to call such a small device a "laptop"??? Usually the difference between a PDA and laptop is that the laptop comes with a full size screen and full size keyboard, the PDA a small screen and either a tiny keyboard or touch screen for input. Any reasonably small sized phone cannot be considered a laptop. Maybe if you could open it up and a bigger screen and keyboard fold out, but I don't see this happening on anything within a resonable price range. Maybe a pen and ink display may make it happen. How would you fit a fold out lcd into such a small space?
I would like to see a device which functions as a camera, phone, PDA, and laptop, and does all of them well. However, I doubt I will ever see one...within the next ten years anyway...
"The optics used in cell phone cameras are certainly a lot better then disposable cameras cheap plastic optics yet those cameras were extremely popular before..."
Sorry, but the disposable cameras take better pictures than cell phones.
Oh, so the cheap disposable cameras has worse quality then the mobile? Then I guess nearly all the pictures from my last open air festival are bad. But then again: on the one taken with the disposable camera you at least can se that there is something on the stage.
Oh, yeah. There are some photos taken during daytime with a good light source (the sun). But the rest of the pictures from my mobile? Forget to see what they are supposed to show you, and it does not get better if you use the flash... And still my mobile is the one of those who had the better quality compared to my friends.
"A cellphone should auto-format phone numbers with parentheses and hyphens when you enter them in the address book. When the cursor is in a number box, like ZIP code, the keyboard should automatically start typing numbers. The owner should not have to press the alternate-symbols key."
I, for one, don't want hyphens or parentheses in my phone numbers, and my zip code starts with a G, so I wouldn't want my keyboard to type numbers in my zip code field.
"A locking feature, which prevents the buttons from being pushed accidentally in a purse or pocket, is nice. But it should be optional. And one button press should suffice to unlock it; two in sequence is just annoying."
Sort of defeats the purpose of locking the keyboard if it can be unlocked with an accidental keypress.
"...looking stunning in your hand..."
Uhh, what? Are phones in the US really that ugly that this plain-at-best handset is judged stunning?
C-x C-s C-x k
Yes, I still miss my Psion Series 3.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But what did Apple do with the iPhone? It charges a hefty premium(note how they were able to drop $200 off the phone in just 2 months) and makes a nice profit with the price($400 now or whatever) and then makes about $450 MORE over two years from the $60 a month that AT&T charges the consumer who takes up the 2 yr contract. The user gets a nice phone, visual voicemail etc. in return, at a VERY HIGH premium.
After a ton of iPhone articles and about a hundered +5 insightful comments on Slashdot about how Apple will "change the game" and make it better for consumers, that is the bottomline. This is the real reason why Apple hates unlockers and not just because of exclusivity contract with AT&T. For every unlocker they potentially lose close to $400.
Apple did change the game of carriers ripping off customers and ushered in the golden era of carriers AND phone companies raping consumers. All this right under the noses of otherwise wise and intelligent people who seem to have been taken in by the "RDF. Apple did change the game of just the
This space for rent.
A phone can never replace a proper camera, as you will never get the same quality and that really matters to anybody who cares about pictures. I can barely tolerate the quality I get out of my Sony camera, and it is pretty much the smallest available camera out there. It is still bigger than most cellphones. Optics take up space. If I know there will be something worth photographing, I bring my DSLR.
PDA: I'll agree with you on this one. I never found stand-alone PDAs useful. Too little storage space, too little screen, pretty much too little anything to stand a chance of replacing a laptop. And, these days a smartphone can pretty much do anything a PDA can.
Laptop: Essential. Ever tried modifying a document on a smartphone? Hah, I'll rather have my nails pulled out slowly with red-hot pliers, thanks. Even viewing a PDF document is an excersise in futility with the small screens. On the other hand, a laptop is too big and cumbersome (even if I carry a 12") to serve well as a portable game console or an MP3 player, so I carry a PSP and an iPod classic as well.
Convergence is pretty much twarted by two forces: the laws of physics and user interface concerns (ease-of-use, boot time, screen size, entry method etc.)
most of the time a mediocre gadget will do fine for the situation. Such as in a car accident when you need to take pictures of the damage but didn't bring your awesome $1000 digital SLR. Or you want to check your e-mail on an airplane trip, but don't want to take your laptop out of the case and then pay another 15 - 20 bucks so you could have wireless access at the terminal. I feel sorry for whoever is taking important family photos with a camera phone, but convergence is an overall good thing.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I can go out and buy an iPhone, Nokia, or whatever, or I can buy this. Why should I care whether it's a WM6 problem or a t-mob problem? It should be usable out of the box.
Wresting power from the carriers, in and of itself, is an entirely neutral thing. The measure of what's good or bad is how much power they give to the users. And Apple has never been about empowering users. "Take it or leave it" is not empowerment.
Like a moth to the flame, I am attracted to your flamboyant sparks.
Yes, the iPhone's design does relate a lot to being from Apple.
But no, Apple didn't "lock the phone," it opened up a standards-based web API that is in many respects better than anything on existing smartphones. The iPhone is also only 4 months old, and Apple has promised additional access in an SDK later this winter. Saying Apple locked the phone for development is ignorant. Saying Apple locked the phone to a single provider ignores the reality that all US phones are locked to one of two network technologies that inherently limits which provider you can chose.
Home activation through iTunes is a lot more consumer friendly than forcing the user to go to a phone store and wait for some dude to poke around on it for an hour, or deal with an online bait and switch as I suffered when I bought a Palm Treo from Amazon using Sprint, and ended up getting cheated out of promised rebates from Amazon while Sprint unilaterally changed my contract and then insisted the contract I'd originally bought wasn't something they offered any more.
No OTA updates for what, your calendar? Email updates OTA, and you can listen to audio and watch real video OTA, without paying and ARM AND LEG for Windows Media based rip-off video from Verizon/Sprint/AT&T garbage services.
Apple didn't brick phones; it warned users that if they modified their baseband or device firmware, that installing additional updates might be a problem. That is ALWAYS the case any time you hack at firmware.
What is a "real keyboard," a chicklet panel that slides out, making the phone an inch and a half thick, or a micro keypad that requires typing with your thumbnail? I've used a variety of "real" keyboards on mobiles, and have to say I'm typing much faster on the iPhone. I'd like arrow keys and a way to copy and paste text around, but the keyboard is fast, simple and very usable, and also gives me a very large screen I can use to play online games, watch movies, or browse the web. Those are all things a tiny screen paired with tiny keys can't do well.
What You Expected, What You Got: RoughlyDrafted Fact Checking
Ten Myths of Mac OS X Leopard: 10 Leopard is a Vista Knockoff!
Whenever I see a device that tries to be "Everything" I am taken back to the 60's to McNamara and his desire to have an airplane that had "commonality" and could serve as the "end all".
The F111 was designed to be both a fighter and a bomber. It was too heavy to land on carriers and could not carry the required equipment and payloads required by the Navy... did not even have gatlin guns on it for a while, and it was too small to carry a large payload and the range was too short to be an effective bomber.
So is the T-mobile a F111 or can these problems be worked out?
This is a time for the designer to eat his/her pride and make it work... if that is possible. It wasn't possible with the F111 and the T-mobile remains to be seen.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Because I just want to cary around a phone. Because I would rather not pay for the other features and have them making the phone heavier, more expensive, more complex and fragile and shorter battery life. Because I don't have or want a PDA, and when I need a laptop, I want a full size keyboard and screen. I only want a camera when I'm on vacation.
If soemeone wants a screwdriver, don't force them to buy a Swiss Army knife.
"Because they want a good quality camera, phone, PDA, laptop, etc. not a all-in-one gadget with a mediocre everything?"
a.) A phone with all that doesn't prevent them from buying a camera, pda, laptop, etc.
b.) If all you have is your phone... and let's be serious, nobody's going everywhere carrying a phone, pda, laptop, camera, video camera, psp, etc.... then a cell phone picture is infinitely better than a 0 x 0 picture. A slow net connection on a small screen is better than a 0kbps connection on a non-existent laptop. 320 by 240 heavily compressed video is better than 0 x 0 video at 0 kbps. And so on. If the phone doesn't suit you, hey, that's fine, no problemo. It makes sense not to buy it. But multiplying the value of a phone by 0 because dedicated hardware that costs a great deal more is better...? No, that's not a sensical decision. That hardware's only useful when you have it with you.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.